


The Waters

by SnowStormSkies



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician), Ashley Dzerigian (Musician), Brian London (Musician), Isaac Carpenter (Musician), Tommy Ratliff (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Religious, Gen, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Watchers, not-exactly-an-angel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 10:34:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnowStormSkies/pseuds/SnowStormSkies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Beyond the Waters, there is nothing. And everything. Souls come and they go, but The Waters stay the same, and so do the Watchers. Until the Waters change.  </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Written for the Reverse Glam Big Bang for artwork #5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [casey270](https://archiveofourown.org/users/casey270/gifts).



> My endless thanks to casey270 for her wonderful help, encouragement, and betaing assistance on this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
> The banner writinchica2k made for the fic! :DDDDD
> 
> And [here ](http://writinchica2k.livejournal.com/255966.html)is the link to the original art that she made as well, and this one to the [community](http://glam-reverse-bb.livejournal.com/12575.html) as well! 

Generations of religious ideology has roughly shaped what the souls expect, divided people between seventy two virgins, a place of eternal peace, a sweetly serene garden where there is only sweetness and gentility.

But all souls in the end return to The Waters.

A vast ocean, dark and glassy smooth, dividing the realms of the living from the Beyond.

_Do not drink from The Waters._

The Watchers guide the souls across the surface, the intangibility of inhumanness allowing them safe passage above the expanse. Nothing living stirs beneath the water, but mortal troubles of the living world cause changes in colour – the dark waters misting cherry red, ashen grey, bruise purple, raw blue.

The wars of the world, the political turmoil, the fires and the earthquakes, the floods and the pandemics, all can be seen in The Waters, if one cares to look.

_The Waters quench no thirst, nor wash away any dirt or sin._

Beyond The Waters _,_ there’s nothing. And everything.

The path back to the mortal worlds forms a shore to The Waters, a blank stretch of nothing leading the souls who are not yet ready to pass on back to the worlds below, pushing through the strange barriers to return to the living.

The Beyond is is what lies on the other side of The Waters too.

Once a soul passes through into the Beyond, they can never return to the mortal worlds. The Above has other plans for them, that is what the Watchers tell their charges, other plans and other places for them.

No Watcher has ever seen the Beyond, though.

Watchers are not Angels – they are beings of grey, of the between worlds, Children of The Waters and the Above and they don’t fit in with either place. Angels are the children of light, beings made of something far lighter and infinite. Angels have other duties – they don’t guard The Waters and take souls across to their next existence.

Adam is not an Angel.

He is a Watcher.

Time is relative – humans have barely the potential to imagine the complexities of the paths between worlds that Adam wanders, watching for the souls he is meant to guide across the and Adam isn’t sure when his own time began, but he knows he’s being doing this a long time. He’s watched civilisations fall, and cities rise, kings deposed, and rebellions crushed – humans are very fond of that sort of thing.

Romans, Vikings, Tudors, the Ming Dynasty, the British Empire, the French Revolution, the fearsome rule of Genghis Khan… Adam’s seen it all. Many times, many ways.

They are all the same, underneath the surface, and the names, and the dates, and the history books.

\--

Isaac, he finds in the midst of a War - the American Civil War to be precise, knee deep in mud and bullets, fighting for independence for a New Nation.

It wasn't an easy death - few deaths in war are, in Adam's experience - but seeing a familiar face, bloodied and damp with sweat is nothing over seeing the gaping wounds in the heaving chest. It's a slow death too, Isaac lingering for hours as a surgeon calls for a priest and Adam watches as the heart - so young, maybe no more than twenty or so - skips and jumps, fighting still even as red oozes from the back. It's not nice, it's not pretty, and when dark eyes close for the last time, it's relief that passes on the surgeon's face, not sadness or anger.

Death can be a kindness.

The soul that reaches for Adam's hands is trusting. Glowing faintly, it's not a perfect replica of the broken carcass beside it, but an artist's rendition of it, perfect and whole again, wide eyed and trusting.

Not all have such faith - Adam has seen souls afraid, seen them cowering, or furious that their beliefs are not yet vindicated, or confused and lost at losing their God, their guiding light, their cherished and loved vision of the Beyond.

Isaac's hand in his is not soft and gentle like a child, but firm, secure in the belief that Adam will lead him to wherever he is meant to be. A man's hand belonging to a man who has that kind of quiet, unshakeable faith.

The Waters bloom red when Adam leads the soul of Isaac across them, each step taking them closer to the divide between worlds, where the Beyond meets the edge of The Waters, and the path back to the realms of the living twists and winds out of sight.

War rages but Adam doesn't think Isaac will find it again - something in the serenity in his face makes Adam change his mind from leading Isaac into the Beyond, into the white wash of light where only the Souls can go. Instead, he nods to Isaac, a look passing between them that says more than Adam can and he sees a faint, half smile on the man's face as he sends him down the path to the living world's again, to be reborn and remade and to relive a life.

Maybe next time - the Beyond is inevitable, but Adam didn't think Isaac was ready. Something in those eyes - a life yet to live.

He'll come back though. They always do.

 

\--

 

He finds Isaac again - this time in the body of a man named Jon, living in Kentucky but hailing from somewhere else that he doesn't remember - a family man missing a leg from a farming accident. There's no great and tragic story here; just a man who set out for a better life, found one with a wife and four children, all boys, a farm that's quietly prosperous, a town that has a schoolhouse and a church, and it's twenty nine miles to the nearest train station.

A quiet life for a quiet man.

Isaac - Adam knew him first as Isaac, and the name - it comes again, and he cannot see him as Jon, no matter what the wooden cross in the back corner of the barn says - doesn't seem to recognise Adam. But the hand in Adam's has the same trust, the same faith that Adam will lead him to wherever he is meant to go, and Adam is strangely - so strangely because he is a Watcher and they do not feel, they only lead and guide and are the last things souls know before they leave the realms of the living - touched.

This time when Isaac crosses The Waters, they bloom white beneath the glassy surface, and the face reflected in them is lined and creased with age and hard work, rather than pain and suffering of war.

But when Adam looks into his eyes, looks beyond the faintness of age and clouds of experience, he doesn't see an old man ready to leave - he sees the same determination and youth he saw in the solider of before, and he knows - he knows so so so well that Isaac is not ready. Not ready for the Beyond yet.

And so he sends him back - leads him back to the path to the lands of the living, and watches the faint glow of a soul not yet done make that journey to be reborn, to return to a time and place which is only known to the Above because it's where he's destined to be.

 

\--

 

Adam finds Isaac again - further back in time this time, wading around in the pond at the back of the school as a soul while his lifeless body on the bank is being tended to by a teacher. Other pupils, barefoot and crying, gather around, a mourning group no older than twelve.

England, 1789, somewhere rural and flat. The sun is shining. There are no clouds in the sky. Isaac was six when he died.

Curly brown hair and bright eyes don't seem to be afraid and perhaps it's not just an age thing, maybe it's just an Isaac thing, but even as Adam watches a carriage pull up outside the schoolhouse, and a man come running, there's no fear in those eyes. No fear at all.

Only trust.

And sadness.

Small fingers wave goodbye to _Papa_ then it's onwards, upwards, outwards, beyond this living realm again.

This time, Adam carries Isaac across The Waters, those waving fingers wrapped around Adam's wrist, and when they reach the shore of The Waters on the other side, the Beyond seems brighter, seems ready and waiting to receive the child in Adam's arms, so close to sleep now.

But there's something that stops him, something small and not so small at the same time, a voice in the back of his mind, and he doesn't want to see Isaac vanish into the Beyond.

Once that happens, they will never meet again.

Never.

Once a soul passes into the Beyond, they are under the Above's watchful gaze, and Adam will never see them again.

But he wants - he wants so much, so badly, so very very very much to see Isaac again, and he knows something is going to be different, something is strange about this Isaac who trusts and who doesn't let fear override his faith that Adam knows he can't send him away just yet.

Small feet run along the path back to the living realm but behind Adam, The Waters flash blue before fading to dark, ominous black.

Adam is a Watcher. They are not meant to intervene, to change destiny, to alter the paths that the Above has decided upon.

But it felt right.


	2. Chapter 2

Adam wanders, confused in his own faith.

The human realms open and close behind him as he passes through them - drifting through the Roman Empire, wandering the mountains in Tibet and helping a lonely traveller up a long stretch of rubble strewn path, travelling on a train across Japan in 2300 and watching as a woman in front of him writes a letter using 21st century English because she's a student and needs to practise.

Humans learn. They change. They evolve.

But Adam is not meant to. Adam is not meant to change and to choose his beliefs - he is not human, and he is not given the freedom of the Above's favoured ones to pick and decide for himself. He has a job in the grand scheme of things, a role to play.

And he refused to play it.

Unsettled and unhappy, Adam keeps wandering, searching for souls but finding none that require his guidance until he reaches the Middle East - a phenomenal seat of Learning for generations, progressive and educated in the Middle Ages.

Inside a house made of white plaster, cool despite the blazing sunlight outside, he finds a young woman.

She's been dead less than a day, younger than Adam first suspected, but the grey of her tongue tells him it was not a peaceful death, not a nice death, not a timely death.

Mourners surround her, women weeping and wailing - outside in the courtyard, a father paces, but he’s listless and pale.

The soul cracks a mirror in anger but doesn't seem to notice Adam.

Not until he touches her shoulder.

A sigh, a tear, another shake of the mirror. No words are needed, no words at all, and Adam respects the distance that she seems to want.

She's not tall - not tall at all, but something inside of her makes her seem bigger, even in death. The way she carries herself too - Adam sees signs of wealth all around her and it seems to have pervaded her even in death. Her clothes, though dark, are shot with gold thread, the carpets are rich and colourful, the food on the side is half eaten and cast away, where Adam knows it will not feed the hungry or the sick.

Gold coins are strewn on the floor, but a dark trail of blood mars their brightness in the sunlight.

He doesn't know what happened to her - it's not his position to ask, it's not his role or right. He is there to guide, to lead, and watch for the souls who need him, and they come from all walks of life, of death, of something in between that lead them to him. He has to treat them all the same, and her wealth and her past mean very little now.

Some souls need carrying, some needing dragging, some need a hand to hold.

Ashaki holds her head up high and the jut of her chin, and the darkness of her gaze tells him _she's_ ready to go. She is. Not him. And Adam nods, opens the way to The Waters, and she walks behind him. Not subserviently, not submissively, but following.

The Waters dust with purple as she moves across them, soft bejewelled slippered feet leaving no trail on the surface as she pads behind him.

Adam cannot send her to the Beyond. Her eyes, dark and solemn, tell him she's not yet ready to travel that final journey, and he steps aside to allow her to pass onto the path back to the human realms.

She takes a moment, an age, an hour, an eternity, to look at him.

She touches his hand.

And leaves him there.

 

\--

 

Ash.

The air smells of ash and burning and fire.

Adam knows it well - cities sacked by invaded are often burned, or wildfires spun out of control, a single house turning the sky orange and smoky - it all smells the same.

Behind him lies a smouldering wreck of a house, a strange hole in the row of terraced houses, their red bricks blackened and dripping from the hoses of yellow clad firemen.

Everything is the colour of a fire here.

It was a flop house, it was the eighties, it was a time of punk and rebellion, it was a cigarette carelessly discarded, it was an accident in the centre of New York that stopped the fire truck from getting here sooner, it was their fault for living in a squat, it was wrong, it was something that needed investigating, it was a tragedy…

Ash lies in front of the fire, her head shaved to just a long strip of blue and green spikes, her nose pierced, her skin smudged with smoke. She’s so still.

Her leather jacket is under her head, and a green sheet laid over her. No breath in those lungs, no life in those eyes, no love left in that heart.

Ash ‘Freedom’ Jenkins, that’s her name, despite _Jane Doe approx. early 20s on_ the brown tag pinned to the green sheet says, and she is twenty four when she dies, and the soul that rises to stand beside her old body doesn't say a word to Adam. Yet again, so quiet but those eyes, those dark dark eyes say more than she understands.

Adam knows just from that first glance he won't be sending her to the Beyond. It's so rare to know before crossing The Waters, so rare and so strange, but her face, her pretty, dirty, still face on the ground and the same again standing before him, slightly glowing says it all.

Once again The Waters bloom purple in her wake, pooling like lilies behind glass underneath her Doc Martens with tartan ribbons for laces and she says nothing to him.

His hand doesn't burn where she touches him, but as she walks away, Adam can't help staring at his hand, his wrist, his perfect skin that suddenly feels too...

Strange...


	3. Chapter 3

Brian he meets once.

Just once.

For a soul to make that impression upon a Watcher who has been around as long as Adam – one of the _first –_ in a single meeting… It’s remarkable.

 _Brian_ is remarkable.

Adam does not judge humanity – that is part of his role, part of his contract. From the generously altruistic and the self serving, to the  warlords and street beggars, his duty is to take them to the same places, in the same way, with the same care and attention, regardless of their death or life.

But sometimes, just sometimes, Adam is surprised.

Because Brian is a slave. Owned by the white man, the illegitimate son of a black woman and a white man, the classic story as it would become known in the 20th century, but during Brian’s lifetime, it’s just a secret, a shameful secret that keeps him forever caught between two worlds, and Adam was called to him so strongly, so completely it’s unnerving.

It doesn’t take long to find him. On the run, and when Adam sees Brian for the first time, he’s still alive, still breathing, still living and fighting and still believing in what he does.

He’s a conductor for the Underground Railroad, taking slaves north and to their freedom, passing them along in the darkness, across his master’s plantation.

Strong, wiry hands draw a map in the dirt of the barn floor, and Adam sees not a tobacco picker, but a musician in those hands, and the part of him that can see into a Soul’s depths tells him he’s right.

A lifetime ago, it must seem to Brian, but his mother used to be a musician, back in his homeland. In this place, this foreign land, both she and her son are less than nothing, a worker, a cog in a machine that can be replaced at any moment with a hundred more.

Adam would move on, but there’s something drawing him back – sometimes, a soul does, something in their eyes, in their work keeping him following them, but he’s never felt it so _strong_ as he does now, never such a pull like an anchor in his heart.

If he had a heart, that would be.

It doesn’t take long to find out why he is being pulled to Brian.

A whisper in the dark too loud, a flash of the lamp light that isn’t stifled quickly enough. The crack of a bullet striking a rock, splinters flying in the darkness, the bellow of a hunting party that hunts only the missing and the enslaved.

Adam watches, and he waits, and he doesn’t react. That’s not his job. The pull of the gun, the explosion of flesh and muscle and bone, the anger competing with fear in Brian’s eyes as he’s pulled onto a horse and taken to back to his master’s yard, none of it disturbs Adam.

At least, not in a way he can explain.

_Make an example of him._

Adam stands beside the soul of Brian as his body dances on the end of a rope on an impromptu gallows. There’s time to wait now. There’s time to watch.

He doesn’t begrudge the soul that – dying in a bed, surrounded by loved ones is always harder, for some reason, to watch than the unceremonious cutting down of a hangman’s latest job. He’s seen it often enough.

Something to do with the sentimentality, something to do with regrets, something to do with the strangeness of the human heart, Adam isn’t sure exactly why souls who die in this fashion are so willing to watch their body be treated so irreverently and he doesn’t need to know.

But sometimes, he wishes he did know. Just because it’s another thing, another piece of being human he doesn’t understand. .

When Adam leads Brian across The Waters, they bristle yellow and grey underneath dark, time worn bare feet, and Adam is both curious, and disturbed by the new colour.

Yellow is change, and change is not always good.

Brian doesn’t even need directing – he knows exactly where he is going. Back to the human worlds, back to see something again, to do something, Adam isn’t sure what, but the determination is there. The conviction in those brown eyes tells him that tomorrow, for Brian, will be a new day not in the Beyond.

They’ll meet again, Adam is sure of it, but he’s not sure why or when or how. Something about Brian is strange, and strange is not always good.

He wanders again. 


	4. Chapter 4

The final piece of the puzzle is a boy.

 

A man.

A soul that is so bright, so familiar to Adam that it might as well be his own, if he had one, but he can’t have one and he doesn’t know why he knows this boy so much, so well.

It starts with an a ikyak, a small boat made when a boy takes the first step in becoming a man, in the midst of an ocean long before they were charted, and named by progressive people.

The boy’s people call this stretch of Water the _Life Giver_ because it’s their main source of food during the spring and summer. Fish in abundance, mussels and crabs in the rockpools, whales who for no reason at all – the will of the gods, the people call it even though Adam knows differently – beach themselves on the shale and give the whole village cause for celebration.

The boy paddles his ikyak closer to Adam and long, tattooed fingers pass across tattooed lips in a gesture that needs no interpretation – speak, friend, - but Adam gives no reply. The boy guides his flimsy craft further out to where Adam sits on a lone rocky outcrop in the midst of this sea.

They call it the Lonely Man, because it’s so far away from anything else that it must be lonely. A culture based around people and being together fears loneliness and this rock in the middle of nowhere must be the antithesis of everything they believe in.

Adam finds it peaceful.

A smooth planed paddle cuts through grey foaming waters to bring the ikyak closer to the lowest step of the rock and Adam watches with vague interest as the boy doesn’t get out of the boat but gestures him closer – no fear in those eyes, no fear at all.

He obliges.

Taw reaches out and pushes his hand right over Adam’s heart.

 _Biewaleh_? He says. _Messenger?_

Adam is not so surprised. Some souls have the ability to see him before they die, linked more closely with the otherness that makes Adam’s world than their fellow humans. Most cultures also have names for Angels, the being he is most mistaken for, and he shakes his head, wondering what the response will be.

 _Yehevu_. The boy presses two fingers against Adam’s heart, and that is surprising. Not **messenger**. _Watcher_.

How does this boy know what he is?

But the boy says no more, and Adam does not talk – he has never been taught, never learnt, never tried because it’s not his job, his place, his role, his directed position by the Above. He has no need to talk - his touch, his gaze, his face is enough for people. They, the souls, can talk, can scream and shout and bellow and whimper and beg and plead and pray all they like - a cacophony of noise they can create, but Adam has no need to talk.

So why does he want to offer up his name to this stranger?

Soft brown eyes watch him without fear as he backs away, taking his craft further and further away from Adam.

How strange that Adam inspires no fear in these people – Brian, Isaac, Ashley, T-....T-... His name is Taw but Adam doesn't understand exactly why but it's not fitting in his thoughts when he thinks of the boy, and he wonders when or even if he'll find the right name.

Souls have names that just seem to fit - it's why Isaac is Isaac, never Jon or Andrew or Lio, why Brian was Brian to him even though his master had called him Paul James…

He expects the boy to die, expects him to wash up on the beach, drowned in his boat, or fall on the slippery crags of the mussel shelves, but it doesn't happen.

Adam watches, and he waits because this is the only soul calling to him now, the only soul who beckons him closer, but it just doesn't happen.

Adam watches, and watches, and watches, but Taw lives, and lives, and lives.

First days, then months, then years pass - and Taw changes from the tiny little half boy, half man in the ikyak to a real man with more tattoos, more memories, more skills and knowledge and strangeness. He marries. Has four daughters. Becomes the chief’s right hand man.

Adam knows that he cannot leave. Something is drawing him to Taw, and he doesn't know what or why, but he doesn't mind.

Taw calls him by title, and the tribe says Taw is gifted. Adam watches him grow older and not necessarily wiser but more confident, more self aware in his later months.

Thirty eight years pass - Taw is fifty when he dies.

There is no fire, no ice, no flood, or wave, or landslide. Just a fall. A fall in the darkness of early morning inside a hut, falling over a stray harpoon. A tiny bone splinter to the brain - that's all it takes. Quick. Easy.

There Adam finds his duty again. Adam has watched this boy for years, from boy to man, and beyond, and every day, he expected Taw to die. He doesn’t understand why he’s being called to follow someone through their life – that’s not _how it works._ Adam’s guided so many souls to the next life that to be asked to change, to watch and see them live a life _before_ he he takes them…

It will make it hard.

Taw stands, beside his body in the floor. There’s no fear in his eyes – no fear at all, and Adam wonders whether that lack of fear will hold true when he sees The Waters but there only thing Taw says to him now is _Nilou._ The end of life.

Not behind, not in front - Taw walks side by side with Adam, keeping pace. His eyes are the same brown that Adam noticed all those years ago in the midst the grey waters on the Lonely Rock.

 

\----

 

Adam wanders again, but the same thing happens – nobody calls to him. The Waters do not bloom for his charges because there _are_ no charges.

Not one.

Adam watches the rise and fall of kings and hunters, peasants and taxes, but not one soul needs his guidance, his hands, his gentle fingers to lead them to The Waters and the Beyond.

He tries returning to The Waters, sitting on the white bank to stare into the mirror grey depths, but they don’t speak to him, don’t bloom brilliant colours and muted shades in his wake, at his touch.

Everything is so quiet, so still it scares him.

Adam is frightened.

What does the silence mean? What does the lack of work for him mean? Is it good? Is it bad? Adam knows he not supposed to understand those concepts, really. He is a Watcher, meant only to do the Above’s work, part of a collective that extends far beyond human comprehension, that doesn’t need individualistic thought, but now, he’s more out of step with that than ever before.

And then he finds the boy again.

 

\--

 

It’s not the gentle pull Adam usually feels, or even the insistent tug he felt when Brian was about to die – this time, the pressure comes from within, a strong claw reaching into him and dragging him so insistently, so quickly across the human realms that Adam hardly blinks between The Waters and the craggy mountainside when he finds the boy again.

Only he’s not a boy.

He’s a man – his face worn thin and haggard by the elements that weather the rock he leans against, and Adam can see this man has not had an easy life.

His limp is pronounced and his scalp, shaved close, has a thin, red scar running from nape to crown. A smooth worn stick taps the cracked and worn path wending through the rocky maze, and Adam senses that not all is _normal._

It’s a forest – the leaves beneath the man’s stumbling feet are yellow and red and burning orange, and the air is cold.

Winter is sharpening her blades, and the old man knows it.

But Adam watches. And he waits.

The man retreats to a cave, nature carving out a deep opening in the mountainside, but the man has blocked it half off with a carefully woven lattice of boughs, daubed with mud, and once it’s secured with two more poles, the wind finds no way in the cave.

Neither does the light until a shaking hand strikes a flint, lights a tallow candle, sets it on the floor between Adam and the old man.

“Du bist doch kein Engel oder?" Adam didn’t expect it again, exactly, but the question _You aren’t an Angel, are you?_ – repeated from a lifetime ago for this man – is easily answered with a nod.

A smile, a shrug, two careful hands digging into a rough hewn box. A book – a diary – is withdrawn. There’s something so calm, so deliberate about the movement, that Adam feels like he’s watching a ritual rather than a single day to day practise.

And so it begins.

Another day to watch and wander, following after an old man in the forest, from rabbit snare and fish trap to a tiny settlement to buy a new coat, and more paper at the base of the mountainside, a huddle of small huts drawn close in the damp air.

A villager greets him with the name _Thomas._

A new name, but the eyes, the eyes are the just the same. Wide, sharp, astute in a way that most humans don’t understand. The same hands, long fingers, gentle even as they snap the rabbit’s neck, or gut the fish with calm confidence.

Adam watches, and he waits and the old man doesn’t speak to him very often. Always aware of Adam’s presence, always ready to meet his gaze, but hardly a word exchanged between them. From sunrise to sunset, winter passes into spring, spring into summer, summer transmuting slowly into autumn, and back to winter again. A steady, natural progression, and the forest around the old man stays the same.

The waterfall thunders on, headless of the snow and the ice or the spring melts or the relentless efforts of the sun to dry up the spring.  

For ten years.

Adam watches and waits, the man buying paper and using ink from crushed berries to write entries that are the only true record of time passing. Rain feeds the forest, and the sun nourishes it , the frost kills it, the rains come again. It’s a cycle. Age old and day young.

Death comes slowly in the forest for the old man, and Adam watches through all of it.

Old age is not a kind death, the souls who die from it tell him, not a pleasant death, but the balance of it is a sweeter life, and Adam doesn’t see regret in the old man’s eyes when his glowing hand touches the empty body he used to inhabit.

To shuffle off this mortal coil.

"Sollen wir einen letzten gemeinsamen Spaziergang machen?"

 _Shall we take one last walk together?_ The man asks, and Adam nods.

A last walk, not down to the village, almost a generation older than when Adam first saw it, not through the mossy cracks in the mountainside to the waterfall, or through the forest to the river to find the fish and the traps.

A last walk to the shores of The Waters _,_ a place much more still.

The silence when they get there is huge.

And Adam is small.

For the first time, Adam is _small_ crossing the vastness of The Waters, the huge expanse of mirror grey and white blooming with _nothing_ under his charge’s feet. Watchers do not feel small – they are part of the collective, a single entity connected to the whole, and they are not alone, not unique, not separate from anything so they cannot feel small.

They cannot feel.

Adam guides this man, this _Thomas,_ to the white shore on the other side, where the Above beckons and the path to the mortal realms gape, and Adam is still reeling from the lack of sound.

He’s spent ten years beside this man, ten years watching him live in almost total silence or so he thought, but it wasn’t true silence. There was the wind, the trees, the rare visitor to the man’s cave, the trips to the village, the waterfall, the sighs and smiles of the old man beside him.

 _Adam’s_ world is so silent.

Thomas says nothing more to him, but the smile on his lips isn’t familiar to Adam, and when he steps onto the path to the mortal realm, Adam is torn between pulling him back to send him to the Above, and pulling him back for _Adam._

Watchers are not meant to feel. Watchers are not meant to know what _want_ means. Hunger means they are not content with what the Above provides, that they are more than what they are and they _are not._

Adam _wants,_ and it’s a hunger inside that will not be satisfied.

The human realm closes behind the Soul that is called Thomas - a name that does not fit even now - and Adam cannot run fast enough.


	5. Chapter 5

Adam leaves behind The Waters.

They are cold and silent.

Where once he thought them serene and a way to be close to peace, they are dark and do not move, do not change, Adam finds himself seeking that change, something different, something more, something _better_ than he can find in The Waters and on the banks.

He watches empires rise and fall again and again, travels through decades of war and rebellion, searches for civil movements and the crumbling government during spring changes.

Nothing satisfies his hunger for something new.

He’s burning through history, looking for a nameless something to appease this knowledge inside of him, this feeling of _more_ and _empty_ that leaves him breathless and panting, even though he _does not breathe._

The pull to a soul is almost something he misses, standing in the middle of London as it burns around him, smoke billowing into the night, flames roaring around him like a beast chained.

It’s Isaac again, Isaac the _fearless,_ and it’s so strange and yet familiar to see that Adam…

He touches him.

Just once, just a hand to a cherubic cheek, the teenager before him standing beside his broken body. A car idles twenty feet away, the driver struggling to climb out.

She’s devastated but her sobs don’t echo in Adam’s ears, they don’t call to him – not like the –

Another soul.

Another soul.

Another soul.

Suddenly, after wandering for so long without duty, without a soul to conduct across The Waters, Adam finds himself being called across the realms in so many directions – but when he tries to take Isaac to The Waters, he can’t. It’s not working.

The souls are calling louder and Adam has no choice.

He’s taken more than one soul before - from a fire or when a group or families dies close together, and that’s not difficult – but never across history, never across time, to find another, and the hunger inside takes him by surprise when he finds Ashley.

Ashley waits for him on a fallen log, her body burning inside a cloth and stick, her horse eating grass as a man tends to it. Blood, now thick and tacky stains the ground before the fire pit, and in the distance Adam can see more people packing away tents and axes, the spoils of war littered on the ground around them as they prepare to leave.

A child, still covered with the caul, wails from the breast of another woman as she daubs his head with red ochre.

Childbirth.

The single biggest killer of women for _centuries._ She is nearly four hundred years away from the human innovation that would have saved her. It’s 1499, and Auia who Adam still sees as Ashley died from it.

Ashley holds onto Isaac’s hand – she can’t be more than sixteen, and her tattoos tell him she’s had one child already.

A son.

Her face is always proud, always determined to show no fear, only strength, but when Isaac takes her hand, the façade crumbles and Adam reaches for her too.

What is another touch, when Adam has already broken so many rules and _not supposed to_ ways now?

And so it goes on.

Another pull, another soul, another journey.

Brian.

A man in his sixties, wealthy, his cowrie shells in the vase beside the bed telling Adam that he is more than just well off, his family around him, singing, dancing, their cries ringing from mud and dung walls. 

Outside, the tribe is electing a new leader and Adam sees the sadness in the old man’s face. Life is quick, but often, it feels much too fleeting even for the most content of men.

 Hands weathered and covered in scars hold onto Ashley’s tattooed fingers that are offered to him, but he needs to no help to stand, no help to move. His face, despite the sadness in the creases and the wrinkles, is at peace

 He looks like Adam should feel.

There are more souls – more than Adam can understand – a boy with red hair, a soul that Adam should see as male, but there’s something indescribably female in the hand and the face, and the eyes, a dark haired black boy child with the beginning of dreadlocks who bangs his hands on the tin pots around his feet as his mother tries to breathe life into his blistered and thin body, a teenager who wears brass knuckles and shouts in the New York Riots, a pair of sisters from the Ivory Coast, who die on a convoy on the way to the market, attacked by raiders, left for dead at side of the road.

It’s like a gathering, Adam leading a train of people, of souls from one realm into another, all holding hands and moving with him as he bounces from one to the next to the next, and Adam is not lonely anymore.

The hunger has a name. _Loneliness._

And it is being appeased. Slowly, so slowly it’s hardly noticeable, but Adam can feel it changing inside.

Every soul he finds is another bit of the puzzle inside of him, but there’s one missing, one very very big one missing right in the …

Thomas.

Thomas.

Taw.

Taw.

The name still isn’t right, still doesn’t fit in Adam’s mouth like it should, and he wants to know why. It’s a need, a want, the newness of it burning away until it feels old and embedded inside of him where nothing should exist. Nothing fits inside of him, and he burns so hard, the chest that shouldn’t have breath, heaving.

Something is changing.

Watchers and The Waters are made of stone and silence, of peace and rock. They do not feel, they do not know, they have only a job to do, and humans are the dynamic, the changeable, the ones who flitter through…

  _There._

 Adam finds the last thread, the final pull.

 It’s not the same as all the others – they were hands reaching out for him – but this is his hand reaching out for the soul that needs him, the soul that’s pulling at the place deep inside of him, into the raw and real insides that used to be empty and ready to be obedient to the Above’s wishes.

 And Adam feels Isaac’s hand firm in his. 

He finds a young man in the midst of a thunderstorm, the rain slicking down the blonde hair on his head, brown eyes and calloused fingers still and hidden.

Foam bubbles from blue lips and the snow around the body is pitted with rain.

Nothing moves in the still meadow, and Adam finds himself clinging to Isaac, struggling to stand up. Something inside is still clawing at him.

But there is no soul.

Adam cannot find the soul – nothing is speaking to him apart from this pull to something he doesn’t understand, but there is nothing here. Nothing here at all. The only souls he can find are his little group, gathered around the lifeless body slowly being covered with slush, and no matter how hard he searches, looking behind trees and rocks, behind hillocks and down in the ditches, and even wading to stand in the river nearby, searching for the soul that may be trapped beneath a bough caught in the rushing flood, though it has never happened before, waist deep in water that should be nothing to him but is suddenly ice cold….

Something is _wrong._

His souls need to be taken to The Waters.

That’s all he can do now. The souls who need his help – the ones he can find at least – need to be taken to their next life. Or wherever they need to go. They can’t stay here – they’re vulnerable, and the Above – Adam doesn’t understand how he knows but he can sense something brewing with the Above – wants them protected.

Isaac holds his hand, and Ashley holds Isaac’s hand, and Brian holds Ahsley’s hand, and so it goes, down the line as Adam guides them across The Waters.

For the first time, The Waters are black.

Solid.

Black.

Dark. Opressive. Cold. An empty bowl signalling hunger, raw ache, absolute nothing between the shores, covered in ice and glass that threatens to splinter and crack beneath Adam's feet, beneath his souls' feet. 

No bloom in colour when a Soul’s feet walk across it.

No mirror grey.

No rainbow or muted hue to mar the solid.

                                                                          black.

                                                                                                      the.

                                                                                                                             wide.

                                                                                                                                                          emptiness.

They are not The Waters.

It is empty.

The opening to the Above is bright, so bright that Adam cannot mistake what he is supposed to do. He cannot disobey the will of the Above. 

He cannot.

But he will.

Because Isaac’s eyes tell him once more, Ashley’s hand tells him just one more time, Brian’s gentle fingers, and the dark haired boy’s smile, and everything else tells him _just one more life._

And the pull inside of Adam tells him that too. Something is not finished. The Waters are not still anymore. They are gone.

The Above is restless.

And the path to the human realms is hard under his feet when he treads on it.

 


End file.
